Jeanne Gang: Revival of the fittest

Blair Kamin, Tribune architecture criticCHICAGO TRIBUNE

Not all of Chicago's architectural fireworks in 2004 came from Millennium Park and its collection of imported superstars. Homegrown talents, especially young architects, made their mark, signaling that Chicago's architectural future may be as bright as its illustrious past. One of those making a big impact was Chicago architect Jeanne Gang.

Gang, 40, taught at Harvard and had her work exhibited at the Venice Biennale and the Art Institute. She made a short list of nationally recognized architects vying to design a new U.S. courthouse in Alabama (the winner will be announced next year). And her 12-person firm, Studio/Gang Architects, completed a bracing new social services building, the Kam Liu Building, in Chicago's Chinatown.

The litany goes on. Gang and her husband/co-principal, 45-year-old Mark Schendel, won an international design competition for the City of Chicago's Ford Calumet Environmental Center on the city's Far Southeast Side. And the pair broke into the high-rise leagues by snagging the job as design consultant for a couple of condo towers at the big Lakeshore East development in Chicago, now rising on a former golf course just west of Lake Shore Drive.

Moving roof

Not bad, considering that Gang and her firm finished their first major building, Rockford's Starlight Theatre, in 2003. Designed when the firm was known as Studio Gang/O'Donnell, the theater features a moving roof that opens like the petals of a flower. That allows an outdoor community theater group to perform whatever the weather. Both the theater and the Liu building in Chinatown won awards this year from the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

Gang grew up in Belvidere, not far from Rockford, the daughter of a civil engineer and a part-time seamstress who works with quilts and makes fabrics. When she was a kid, the family would go out and look at new roads and bridges. Her mother's influence is equally apparent in her exploration of new textures for familiar materials. For a future social services building on Chicago's South Side, for example, she's playing with brick so it forms a partly open, screenlike facade rather than a massive, load-bearing wall.

"These are women's things," Gang said in an interview at the firm's offices at 1212 N. Ashland Ave., though she hastened to add that there is nothing sentimental about her interest in the expression of materials. "The more things you have in your bag of tricks," she said, "the better."

Gang designs in a modernist idiom, but unlike the abstract, steel-and-glass boxes of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, her work usually has some recognizable feature that invites non-architects to explore it. The Liu Building, for example, flaunts a skin of titanium shingles that resemble the scales of a dragon. Similarly, the Ford Calumet Environmental Center will have an outdoor patio encased in a nestlike metal mesh. The mesh not only will keep birds from flying into glass but also will project a strong natural image.

As the environmental center design shows, Gang believes in buildings that respond directly to the particulars of their site. She's also big on what she calls "veiling" -- buildings that reveal themselves gradually rather than all at once. And reflecting her tenure with Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, Gang believes that, by creatively interpreting a building's set of uses, or program, architects can simultaneously generate the form of its exterior and energize the spaces of its interior.

"I never thought about [architecture] as style," she said.

Large-scale projects

While the brutally tight economics of high-rise housing have frustrated many talented architects, Gang and Schendel, another Koolhaas alum, insist they can ride this tiger without getting bitten. Because they worked on large-scale projects for Koolhaas, they are not intimidated at the prospect of making the leap to 30- to 40-story high-rises at Lakeshore East. Their towers, which will be produced by architect-of-record Loewenberg + Associates, will rise across Columbus Drive from the 1,136-foot Aon Center.

"That scale is completely comfortable to us from the [Koolhaas] experience," Schendel said. They credit one of Lakeshore East's co-developers, Jim Loewenberg, for seeking out a "hungry" young firm that wants to push the aesthetic envelope. Loewenberg, both a developer and an architect, has designed many of the oft-criticized exposed concrete high-rises in River North.

As impressive as Gang's output has been, the most telling sign of her success is the stack of resumes that sit on a desk inside her firm's office. Many are from out-of-town architects, including some from overseas. Word about Gang and her firm is clearly spreading, as is word of Chicago's architectural revival after the largely dormant decade of the 1990s.